In our bright, freedom-filled modern era — where every transaction is monitored, every public figure rehearses sincerity, and your refrigerator may be spying on you — there hums an unholy alliance of state power, finance, and technology. It runs on algorithms, lobbyists, and a deep belief that if you kill enough people in the right order, history will send you a fruit basket.
It’s a busy ecosystem: governments outsourcing morality to private contractors, corporations lending their brightest geeks to the Pentagon on weekends, and the whole thing tied together with Israeli-made spyware like tinsel on a Christmas tree. This is the “Israelization” of American foreign policy — less about bagels and falafel, more about targeted killings, narrative control, and a surveillance state so intimate it knows when you’re thinking about switching toothpaste brands.
Israel, of course, wrote the modern playbook. Ronen Bergman’s Rise and Kill First politely stops short of certain awkward chapters, but still catalogs nearly 3,000 foreign political assassinations. Recent highlights include the 2025 vaporization of Iran’s top brass and that mysterious 2024 helicopter malfunction that just happened to decapitate Iran’s leadership. And that’s only the official mixtape.
The U.S. used to frown on assassination, back when we thought “international law” was a thing. Then 9/11 happened, the lawyers got creative, and “assassination” was rebranded as “targeted killing,” like some artisanal craft beer you order at a Brooklyn gastropub. We lured General Soleimani to peace talks in Iraq, then droned him into a fine mist. It’s not subtle, but subtlety doesn’t get you standing ovations from Congress when Netanyahu visits for the fifteenth time.
The thinking is always the same: “Take out the leader, the regime collapses, and democracy breaks out like acne on prom night.” Instead, the opposite happens. You kill an Iranian president, the flag factories work overtime. You poke at Putin, he just stops using windows. You fantasize about a post-CCP China, forgetting they have more cash, more factories, and more patience than your entire think tank combined.
Ah, but finance. Always finance. The assassination habit isn’t just about enemies with uniforms — it’s about anyone who messes with the house bank. From Lincoln to JFK, presidents who questioned the ruling monetary priesthood have had unfortunate encounters with bullets. The Fed may be “independent,” but it’s amazing how often independence rhymes with “untouchable.” Today, Wall Street and Washington still run the same magic trick: money out of nothing, debt out of money, and citizens out of luck.
Enter the tech bros. Palantir, Cellebrite, Cognyte — Israeli-engineered or Israel-adjacent outfits who cut their teeth enforcing occupation, now selling “freedom-grade” surveillance to everyone from the U.S. Navy to the Department of Fish and Wildlife. (Because you never know when a trout might be plotting regime change.)
The Pentagon isn’t shy about it. Detachment 201 — the Army’s “Executive Innovation Corps” — has hoovered up CTOs from Palantir, Meta, and OpenAI, strapping them into reserve uniforms so they can better fuse Silicon Valley optimism with the business of finding people and killing them. It’s basically LinkedIn with missile coordinates.
Meanwhile, the battle for your attention is fought on the digital front. The U.S. flails at EU regulations, pretending to defend free speech while really protecting revenue streams. Elon Musk rebrands Twitter as X, lobbing memes like grenades into the narrative war zone. Everyone claims they’re saving democracy, while quietly trying to own the user manual for reality.
This is where it gets funny — if you ignore the body count. The tools perfected in Gaza become the toys of local police in Boise. The legal arguments made for “targeted killings” abroad creep into domestic politics like a raccoon through a dog door. And the people at the controls — convinced of their genius — keep thinking they’ve finally solved the human problem, not realizing they are the human problem.
In short: assassination as a foreign policy tool is contagious. Surveillance is addictive. Finance still calls the shots. And the whole machine runs on the unshakable confidence of people who have never once considered that history might not applaud them.
But here’s the thing: nothing terrifies these folks like ridicule. You can call them murderers, tyrants, or sociopaths and they’ll wear it like a medal. But mock their white papers, point out their receding hairline, or suggest their “innovation hubs” smell faintly of yesterday’s Axe Body Spray, and they’ll bog the log. They’ve built an empire on fear. Humor is the dorky Uber driver reminding them that the empire still takes a dump now and then.